A misleading intro

The primary teachers’ union has launched legal action over female support workers’ being paid $8 per hour less than males.

If this was true, it would be an outrage. But female support workers are not paid $8 per hour less than male support workers.

NZEI national secretary Paul Goulter said it had been more than six years since an independent job evaluation report by the Pay and Employment Equity Unit showed that support workers employed by the Ministry of Education were paid as much as $8 an hour less than a comparable male-dominated job.

That is quite a different thing. This is what unions do. They say nurses should be paid the same as police and as nurses are mainly female and police mainly male, it is gender discrimination.

I don’t want a centrally planned economy where the courts decide how this industry is equivalent to this industry and they must be paid the same. That’s what the Soviet Union used to have. At the end of the day, wage rates will reflect the level needed to recruit and retain staff.

srylands

I get annoyed when people train in a field, knowing what the market wage rates are, and then complain about how much they are paid. If you train to be a nurse you know full well how much you can expect to get paid when you graduate.

wreck1080

I must correct one thing —- males are better at negotiating salaries than females which is why the number of males in an industry is a predictor of that industries relative income level.

And, this is one of the reasons nurses are paid less. Females are just poorer at salary negotiations than males.

@srylands — nurses used to get paid the same as cops and teachers — so, a nurse entering the industry back then would have had no idea that this would change so drastically in future. You can hardly blame the nurse for that.

But for todays trainee nurses though, I agree with you.

Nursing has turned into a shit career option anyway. My partner is one and the job and pay has deteriorated such that it is just not a good career choice in the modern world. You can probably blame the nurses union to a good degree, and the flood of cheap foreign labour . There are now so many foreign nurses in our system it is very difficult for locally trained nurses to get jobs.

rouppe

If it is valid to compare nurses and police officers, then the skills must be comparable.

If the skills and conditions of work are comparable, and the nurses think they are underpaid, then they can always transfer their skills to the Police.

The fact that this isn’t happening suggests some things:
* The skills may not actually be comparable
* Nurses see the physical threats Police face and don’t consider it suitable employment for them

Now I have healthy respect for nurses. They are often dealing with the dross of society, and who really wants to pull Marmite jars out of places they shouldn’t be? But everyone needs to weigh up all the aspects of the vocation they choose. Part of that is money. Part of that is the environment they work in and the people they deal with.

@Wreck1080: there’s an ongoing problem with jobs that aren’t amenable to technology support, and therefore aren’t seeing productivity gains. Health and education are the two biggest examples of industries that have not yet had significant technology encroachment.

If an auto worker used to make 1 car a day, and now an auto worker (plus a team of robots) make 10 cars a day, then the auto worker probably got a pay rise. (The auto worker also probably needs to know how to maintain robots, so the skills have changed). Whereas a nurse is still rolling the patient over and wiping his arse using the mk1 tissue.

Automation is starting to move into aged care and education, and will come to nursing too. As that happens the nurses will be able to improve productivity (maybe they’ll supervise a ward of 10 patients instead of 5, or whatever), and their pay will increase somewhat when that happens. But the skills needed will also change, as they did for the auto worker.

(Note: I know my examples are fragile here – it’s a conceptual discussion. Actually many auto workers are still unskilled and are getting replaced not more productive, and there are elements of automation in healthcare but that automation is sometimes reducing productivity but increasing quality – for example new imaging technologies).

burt

Breaking news: Angry Andy promises to introduce wage and price controls if elected. Reacting to criticism that his policies are like Muldoon’s he claimed they are nothing of the sort because the party logo is red not blue.

burt

Question 1 for all leftards:

Should it be illegal to accept an offer to work if the pay is not the same as somebody else doing “the same” job ?

Question 2 for all leftards:

Please define “same job” and justify how individuals must be compared as the same at that job because the job title defines the job rather than how an individual performs the tasks and manages the responsibilities of “the same job title”.

Ross12

Are they comparing apples with apples. They are talking about support workers –in a school this could include the care taker , cleaning staff, teachers aids , the canteen workers, secretaries, the school “business manager” etc. My guess is the we are seeing the usual averaging exercise here and not comparing say, female teacher’s aids with male teacher’s aids.

Brigitte

If Little stood down as leader and became a backbencher and Jacinda was promoted to leader then that would improve the Male:Female pay discrepancy amongst Labour MPs. Then they would be demonstrating that they are leading by example.